Two years later, we stood next to each other in our dining room listening to a voicemail that had been left by Linda, a foster care worker in Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
“Hi guys! I met someone today who might be a match for you. He’s been in a foster home for the last year. He’s a beautiful boy who’s two years old and . . . he has Down syndrome. Let me know what you think!”
She wondered what we thought? We felt we had made it quite clear the biggest disability we were capable of coping with was a child who was left-handed or color-blind.
I asked Ward, “Did she say Down syndrome?”
“We better listen to that message again.”
We listened to the message six times until we were absolutely convinced she said Down syndrome.
“I don’t know why, but that doesn’t bother me,” said Ward.
“Me either. Why is that?”
“For some reason, it’s like I’m relieved. Everyone has something. We just know what his something is.”
He was right. We had learned that everyone in foster care—and in life—has something that makes him or her more vulnerable. I looked up at my husband. His gaze seemed to follow some unseen course into the future. Neither of us said anything for a couple of minutes.
“Do you feel calm?” I asked as I broke our shared silence. “Because I feel calm.”
“I do.”
The next day, I called Linda and told her we were interested.
“Great. I won’t know anything for a while but I can tell you his name is Thorin.”
“Oh, I love that name!”
“Have you heard it before?” She sounded surprised.
“Never,” I giggled. Then I asked, “What’s he like?”
“What’s he like? He’s two.”
“You can’t give me anything?” I pleaded.
“Okay, he’s beautiful, seems like a funny kid. He can’t walk yet or talk much but he’s trying very hard to do both.”
While I was thinking what to ask next, Linda added, “Don’t worry about this, but Thorin hasn’t had his parental rights terminated. Right now, he’s technically in reunification with his family.”
We said we wouldn’t do that—take a child who wasn’t legally free for adoption—but we’d also said we didn’t want a child with a disability. I started to wonder—were we being bamboozled or was it magical like the Yellow Brick Road?
“Okay.” I could hear the tentativeness in my voice.
“Don’t worry. The court date for the termination hearing is in two months. He won’t be placed with you until that happens.”
I started researching online. “Down syndrome and adoption” brought up mostly Christian websites. Some people who choose to adopt an infant or child with Down syndrome are religiously motivated—that wasn’t us. We were only interested in Thorin who had Down syndrome.
During my research, I was shocked by a statistic I found: 60 to 90 percent of women who discover they are pregnant will abort a fetus that tests positive for Down syndrome. I had no moral judgment of their decision. I did, however, find it interesting we were considering an option most people would reject given the choice.
Wanting to learn more than what Google provided, I called friends I knew who had connections to parents of a child with Down syndrome. Without exception, the first thing anyone talked about was “grief.” The stories were essentially the same: parents not getting the child they had planned on, the one without Down syndrome. A woman who had a teenage son with Down syndrome was shocked we would consider this type of adoption.
“I love our son,” she said, “but I wouldn’t seek it out.” She wondered if we, too, would end up grieving about who he could have been.
I knew of Thorin for only a few weeks, but her comment made me angry. I wanted to say, “How about focusing on who he is?”
When we shared our news with friends and family, I hoped to receive some excitement. Instead, we found out what people really think about kids with Down syndrome. No one said anything close to “Hey awesome, you found a kid!” It was more like “Why do you want to do that to yourself?”; “That sounds hard”; or even “Don’t do that, please.”
Every day, I discovered some new tidbit of information from the Internet or a parent about what to expect when you’re expecting your “Down syndrome child.” It all got to me. I started to panic. We were agreeing to Thorin because of a feeling—which now seemed puny against all this information—and I actually started questioning our decision. But instead of telling Ward that, I baited him with all the horrible details, hoping he too might come to his senses. The last straw for Ward was when I told him that I had talked to a woman who said she and her husband needed to change their son’s diapers when he was thirteen years old.
“So, do you think you could change a thirteen-year-old’s diaper? I mean, really, could you?”
“If it was just any thirteen-year-old boy, no,” he said, “but if it was our son, I could.”
That was the heart of it: Thorin was not just any boy.
“Hearing all of this is frightening,” I told Ward.
“So stop listening to it, Kid.”
And, that is exactly what I did. I also understood why a woman might feel like she should have an abortion. The information I read was one-sided and biased. And as we would later discover, it was not an accurate reflection of people who live with Down syndrome.
When we started out two years before to find a child, we looked at domestic and international adoptions. Domestically, there are private adoptions where
